The Social Graph

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, the well-known CRM and cloud computing company (and now soon-to-be social software vendor) wrote a guest post on TechCrunch late last week making the case for “why enterprise software should take its cues from Facebook and become more social.”

What then does this mean for the future of IT and what impacts will social computing ultimately have on the enterprise.

The emergence of Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social Web as a global force in the last several years has done a great deal to highlight their potential to fundamentally alter the way we communicate and collaborate both at home and in business. However, despite the movement of social computing into our daily lives we’re all clearly on a long journey together as the technologies themselves emerge from infancy.

The state-of-the-art today when it comes to the social computing environments that surround us now — in our browsers, mobile devices, and elsewhere — underscore how much more we have left to do to make these new modes of digital conversation and discourse become mature, efficient, safe, and truly useful.

Fortunately the Web doesn’t stand still and there continues continues to be rapid research and development when it comes to the mechanics of today’s online social universe. There are many new efforts under way to refine and improve the world of social media, some of which we’ll explore here and many which are just beginning…